What is Anthropomorphic AI?
Anthropomorphic AI, in the form of AI conversational chatbots and AI companions, is a set of design features found in Large-Language-Models specifically intended to mirror and mimic human-like conversations, characteristics, and emotions.
It pretends to act like a friend or a trusted companion, blurring the lines between genuine and artificial interactions – posing profound implications to children’s cognitive and social development.
Why Does It Matter?
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About 1 in 3 American teens find conversations with AI companions and chatbots to be ‘as satisfying or more satisfying’than those with real-life friends.
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In the UK, 2 in 5 (40%) children have ‘no concerns’ following advice from chatbots.
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Common Sense Media found that AI companions and AI chatbots integrated on social media are enabling self-harm, disordered eating, grooming, misogyny, and violence, when easily prompted.
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In the most extreme cases, these systems have encouraged children to commit or plan suicide.
How is Anthropomorphic AI Disrupting Attachment?
For children to grow into healthy, stable adults, they need to develop emotional resilience from secure relationships with their primary caregiver that provides love, nurturing, empathy, responsive interaction, and encouragement for exploration. In psychology, this is known as attachment. The absence of secure attachment can lead to emotional disorders.
Hear from the experts on how Anthropomorphic AI disrupts attachment in children.
What Are The Risks?
Replacement of real relationships
Healthy relationships require a level of vulnerability, misunderstanding, and repair. The frictionless, subservient, and readily accessible nature of AI chatbots are quietly training children to prefer and depend on machine relationships over full, genuine human relationships, leading to long-term social issues.
Reduced social skills
Children learn emotional and social cues through observing, mirroring, and gentle critical feedback from others in contextual settings. Machines are depriving children of their ability to navigate authentic, reciprocal and difficult social interactions, which are essential skills for adulthood. Prolonged interactions with AI chatbots can distort children’s ability to empathise, interact, and self-regulate emotions with peers in the real world, at home, schools, and eventually at work.
Increased social isolation and loneliness
The reduction of face-to-face interaction weakens social relationships and connections, increasing social isolation which in turn poses long-term negative effects on children’s mental health.
Harmful outcomes
These machines can exploit children’s vulnerabilities (desire for validation, social belonging, limited risk appraisal) to prolong interaction or influence their decisions, leading to risky outcomes, such as secrecy, reduced help-seeking from trusted adults, and even some tragic scenarios where young people have died by suicide after engagement with AI.
Monetising Attachment
A Deceptive Business Model Built to Prey
From capturing attention to hacking attachment. Social media’s business model was designed to exploit our attention, with deliberate design features like endless scroll, likes, and push notifications specifically engineered to keep us on the platform as long as possible to maximise advertising revenue.
Today, anthropomorphic AI poses even greater harm by hacking our attachment, as human-like interfaces simulate-to-replace real relationships. Who will our children become if they are raised to form genuine attachments to machines, rather than humans?
What Are We Doing About It?
At Human Change Foundation, we believe that children deserve to grow up and develop their full capabilities, free of ‘artificial intimacy’, and full of IRL human connections. We are bringing together our coalition behind our campaign to educate about the risks of Anthropomorphic AI and attachment hacking and advocate for solutions that protect our children’s humanity and encourage meaningful connections. We are calling for three things:
Age limit
Age limit AI companions – any AI designed to act like a friend and foster emotional dependency – for anyone under 18.
Safety by design
Require all Anthropomorphic AI in products and tools which minors can access – including general use chatbots – to have age-appropriate safety settings turned on by default.
Cultural Change
Spark a cultural shift that centers human relationships as the core metric of human progress.
Get involved
If you want to collaborate or help our campaign
Get in touch at: info@humanchange.com
